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Syntactic ambiguity, also known as structural ambiguity, [1] amphiboly, or amphibology, is characterized by the potential for a sentence to yield multiple interpretations due to its ambiguous syntax. This form of ambiguity is not derived from the varied meanings of individual words but rather from the relationships among words and clauses ...
When readers take part in the letter detection task and are given a connected text to read, there are less letter detection errors of a target letter (for example ‘t’) when it is situated as the initial letter of a word (e.g. tree) compared to when it is embedded into words (e.g. path). [21]
In this way, ambiguity is viewed as a generally useful feature of a linguistic system. Linguistic ambiguity can be a problem in law, because the interpretation of written documents and oral agreements is often of paramount importance. Structural analysis of an ambiguous Spanish sentence: Pepe vio a Pablo enfurecido.
Seven Types of Ambiguity ushered in New Criticism in the United States. The book is a guide to a style of literary criticism practiced by Empson. An ambiguity is represented as a puzzle to Empson. We have ambiguity when "alternative views might be taken without sheer misreading." Empson reads poetry as an exploration of conflicts within the author.
Lexical ambiguity is a subtype of semantic ambiguity where a word or morpheme is ambiguous. When a lexical ambiguity results from a single word having two senses, it is called polysemy . For instance, the English "foot" is polysemous since in general it refers to the base of an object, but can refer more specifically to the foot of a person or ...
The fallacy of amphiboly also involves ambiguity in meaning, but this ambiguity arises not on the level of individual terms but on the level of the sentence as a whole due to syntactic ambiguity, [24] for example: "The police were told to stop drinking on campus after midnight. So, now they are able to respond to emergencies much better than ...
Obfuscation is the obscuring of the intended meaning of communication by making the message difficult to understand, usually with confusing and ambiguous language. The obfuscation might be either unintentional or intentional (although intent usually is connoted), and is accomplished with circumlocution (talking around the subject), the use of jargon (technical language of a profession), and ...
Empson's best-known work is the book Seven Types of Ambiguity, which, together with Some Versions of Pastoral and The Structure of Complex Words, mines the astonishing riches of linguistic ambiguity in English poetic literature. Empson's studies unearth layer upon layer of irony, suggestion and argumentation in various literary works, applying ...